“Leafy-with-love banks” begins one of Patrick Kavanagh’s celebrated pair of poems about the Grand Canal in Dublin, where he used to sit and meditate during the spiritual rebirth that accompanied his recovery from cancer in the 1950s.
Well, those canal banks are leafier than ever in these days. Thanks to rewilding, there is a wall of greenery six feet high in places, towering over passers-by on the walking paths.
Love, by contrast, is in short supply. For the other thing that’s towering over people is a chain fence of barricades, of the kind normally used in concert security, all the way from Mount Street to Harolds Cross bridge.
Those are there to block access to any stretches of flat greenery, where lovers might lie together. Although of course it’s migrant tents, not courting couples, the fences are intended to deter.
Ostentatiously discreet – Frank McNally on the French honours ribbon
The spirit of Dublin – Beatrice M Doran on distiller and lord mayor George Roe
A giant of the stage – Gerard Smyth on Donal McCann
Centre of excellence – Frank McNally on Irish literature’s most famous phrase and the rise of Gallic football
“O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web of fabulous grass,” Kavanagh wrote in the same sonnet. Now, because of proximity to grass, his seated likeness (in John Coll’s 1991 sculpture) is instead encaptured in a web of barricades. Happily, you can still sit down beside him (or even on his lap as one young woman did for a selfie when I walked by Thursday). But the original Kavanagh seat on the opposite bank is completely incarcerated.
The poet himself suggested that monument in his other canal sonnet: “Commemorate me thus beautifully/Where by a lock niagarously roars/The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence/Of mid-July.”
Now inscribed on the bench, the poem also includes the line: “And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy and other far-flung towns mythologies.”
But the barges don’t come from Athy anymore. And if the ugly fencing around the seat had a poem to explain itself, it would more likely warn of buses bringing from Belfast and other far-flung cities asylum seekers.
Speaking of the tremendous silence of mid-July, by the way, there wasn’t much of that either when I passed.
A new office block was rising on a corner opposite Baggot Street bridge, in a symphony of JCB engines and jack-hammers. And there were noises off from a turbulent world too. Graffiti on a hoarding opposite the poet loudly proclaimed: “Victory to Palestine”.
***
The barricades present a harsh and uncaring face of Dublin. Happily, actual faces in the city continue to compensate. Walking along Grand Canal Street last Sunday morning, en route to a job, I noticed people gathered around the prostrate form of a man with blood all over his forehead.
It was obvious from a glance he was a hard drinker, probably living rough. But worse than the usual Sunday Morning Coming Down, as the song says, he had stumbled and hit the footpath head-on.
So naturally, I asked the bystander nearest me – a taxi driver who’d pulled in – if they’d called an ambulance (they had), as about 10 other passers-by would later do.
A young American, meanwhile, had found out the man’s first name and, squatting beside him, addressed him by it continually while trying to keep him conscious.
Then an off-duty nurse – of eastern European accent and appearance – arrived and she squatted down too, treating the patient with that combination of clinical detachment and tenderness that makes us fall in love with nurses.
Me and others stood around, being uselessly sympathetic. When 10 minutes passed with no ambulance, the nurse rang again.
My main contribution was to add local colour to her attempts to describe the address. “Near Slattery’s Pub, tell them,” I said.
She hung up to report ruefully “they can’t send an ambulance as quickly if the person is still breathing”, which sounded like a joke but it seems wasn’t.
One man who had to go somewhere took his leave apologetically, saying to the rest of us: “Fair play to yiz.” Then the ambulance came and the paramedics took over. So we left them to it.
It’s not much of a story, I know. But it has a moral. Contrary to what you might think at times, even in big, barricaded, cities, people do still care.
***
In another July, 60 miles north of the Grand Canal, Patrick Kavanagh found himself excluded from a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn and later wrote a sonnet about that too. This has since inspired a commemorative weekend.
Hence the Inniskeen Road July Evening festival, which starts Friday night in the original Kavanagh Country of South Monaghan, still happily barricade-free.
Instead of a no-man’s land, the weekend opens with No Man’s Fool, Sé Merry Doyle’s documentary on the poet. Then on Saturday, putting the Monet in Monaghan, there will be the inaugural “Monaghan Plein Air Festival”, an all-day event involving artists working outdoors, followed by an exhibition of their work.
But the flagship event is on Sunday, with a day of dancing, music, and story-telling in and around Inniskeen. The event is free and all-inclusive, even of poetic loners. The going by of bicycles, in twos and threes or otherwise, is “encouraged but not essential”.